


Give Me Your Lungs (I Can't Breathe and I Want To Sing)

by Whispering_Sumire



Series: Wait For Me To Come Home [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Laura Hale, Character Study, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/F, Heartache, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Laura Hale-centric, Loss, Love, Love Letter To Second Person, Original Character(s), POV Second Person, Poetic, Poignant, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series, Symbolism, Weretiger, second person narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 12:06:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16095329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whispering_Sumire/pseuds/Whispering_Sumire
Summary: Your hands play along the ephemeral cream of her skin, and between one spasming breath and the next, her pupils dilate, irises spilling, blooming, rose petals unfurling in the midst of heterochromatic galaxies, hemorrhaging until all her impossibility, painted in existential watercolor, is nothing but blood, and in that, temporal.It is surprising how utterlyhumanshe becomes when her eyesflashlike this, surprising how she loses her transcendence to something so base. And yet, still, she is the wild type of beauty that makes you wonder if it was the earth itself- the soil, the tree roots, and the old gods all but forgotten- who gave birth to her, where before you'd wondered if it was the stars.She turns to you, then, and there's grief written in every line of her face, horrible, atrocious, tormented with confusion, disbelief.





	Give Me Your Lungs (I Can't Breathe and I Want To Sing)

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to Give Me My Heart, written from Cahya's perspective in second person narrative.

When you were young you were taught to be ancient.

You were a tigress who often consorted with wolves. You were your own guardian, you held your own counsel, and you were honestly, irrevocably _yourself_ , which some chose to struggle with, while others chose to accept, without difficulty, that your stride was matched to the pounding feet of the sun against zher dancefloor, the sky, and they could either follow you or get out of your damn way.

Your father was proud for having a daughter like you, your mother had no _patience_ for you, and you were _not_ a Pack animal. Your family was a Pride of lions in wolf territory and you were a thing that had no business being there. It was not your nature to sing songs of togetherness, not your nature to wait for others to catch up with you, not your nature to _listen_.

Someone once told you derisively that you had no respect for authority, and you wondered why they were trying to shame you for something you loved about yourself.

You were **wild** : you were _will_ and _freedom_ and _rebelliousness_ incarnate, and yet still you fell in love with her.

You could never tell if you wanted to break her ribs to escape from the cage of her soul, or if you wanted to sew yourself more firmly inside with strands of her hair.

When you first saw her, she was laughter on the edge of howl, her teeth were sharp things that sunk into the fur of a small prey animal's neck, but somehow managed not to kill it, and you thought she was foolish for her kindness. Her fingers would flex against the sky like branches of a tree, and her toes would curl into the dirt like roots as stardust fell from her eyes and she traded all her pale skin for fur. She was _always_ smiling, flower-petal lips pulled back, blooming, against ivory bone and spit-slick gums, always, _always_ beautiful.

She was the daughter of the moon, a child of chaos, a woman made for Pack and people and enveloped by familial responsibility that she _flourished_ in.

It serves to say, then, that you hated her fervently before you ever dared love her.

She was _dangerous_ (and they called you danger as well, didn't they?), a hurricane with long, steady legs and ink-silk curls, bound by nothing and everything all at once. When you _did_ fall in love with her, you quietly thought that she was devastating, and you swallowed down the tempest of her soul, anyway, because it was impossible _not_ to.

Her father was not of the people, his blood ran without a shadow of magic to graze it, and you could only ever think his humanity monstrous when he told her she did not know her own mind, for saying that she loved you, too. You could only ever hate him, when, in the long, breathless night, she would lay with you against the passion of the dirt- brittle leaves and writhing worms and wet-crumble loam that life is _born_ from- and tears would run delicate rivers down her cheeks as the moon painted spirals of light across her eyelids. Coated in her own fragility, she would ask you if she was not worthy, if she was not right, if this was not real.

You resented how much you loved her, then, because every word that tumbled from her lips broke your heart absolutely, and all you could do against the man that made her doubt her own judgment, her own heart, her own _identity_ , was scorn him in your own mind, because you were sure if you condemned him out loud she would never forgive you, such was _her_ love for _him_.

So you wept with her, all impotence and frustration and the bur of his ignorance lodged in the back of your throat as you held his daughter in your arms and you hated— **hated** him in the midst of all this poignant devastation, you _hated_.

* * *

She is in your bed with you when it happens, reposeful even in the aftermath of her most recent battle with him. You've seen her eyes flash before, you've seen her shift and change like stretching out a well-honed muscle, but it has never been like this.

You're both laying together, the darkness milky around you and coated in the smoke of the incense you're burning, mingled with the aftertaste of the cigarette you'd smoked, the scent thick, but not heavy. You're both naked and sweat-soaked and curled into each other, tangled in pale-dust blue sheets as much as you're tangled in each other.

Your hands play along the ephemeral cream of her skin, and between one spasming breath and the next, her pupils dilate, irises spilling, blooming, rose petals unfurling in the midst of heterochromatic galaxies, hemorrhaging until all her impossibility, painted in existential watercolor, is nothing but blood, and in that, temporal.

It is surprising how utterly _human_ she becomes when her eyes **flash** like this, surprising how she loses her transcendence to something so base. And yet, still, she is the wild type of beauty that makes you wonder if it was the earth itself- the soil, the tree roots, and the old gods all but forgotten- who gave birth to her, where before you'd wondered if it was the stars.

She turns to you, then, and there's grief written in every line of her face, horrible, atrocious, tormented with confusion, disbelief.

Her brows furrow, lips pulling back to bear her teeth in a shaky, pained grimace as water wells in her eyes, obscuring the glittering rubies with rain. "They're _gone,"_ she gasps, like the words clawed their way up from her lungs, scratched deep, gaping gouges in the inside of her throat just to dance, taunting and dressed in the gore that they wrought, off the tip of her tongue, out into the air. "My Pack-bonds, my—" she chokes, and her tears flow, sliding down her cheeks until you brush them away, let them decorate your thumb. "I think they're dead," Laura breathes, scrambling to get up, clothe herself, backing away— not from you, not really, but your hand drops, anyway, without her there to anchor it, and though you want to reach out, again, for her—you don't. You can't. "Gods, I think they're _all_ **dead**."

"Laura," you protest, and you don't even know _what_ you're protesting, maybe it's the guilt in her eyes, maybe it's how she keeps getting further and further away, like the tide returning to the sea, leaving the muddy-sanded beach bereft until it comes back, even though it knows it'll lose a few grains of itself to the water every time. There's this feeling opening up in your gut like a pit, a cavernous, overwhelming void that wants nothing more than to _consume_ you, a whisper in the back of your mind telling you you'll never see her again if she walks out right now, leaves like this. _"Laura."_

It's too desperate to be a question, and too wavering to be a demand; all of your vulnerability in that one word, in her _name_. And that's where your vulnerability has lied for a long time, isn't it?

You love her, you need her, you _want_ this. _Please, please, **please——**_

(Because you already know you will not follow her. You have a long-term plan for your future, a plan that you had yet to even fully broach with her—you'd both kept putting it off because you'd both known it was a plan she wouldn't be able to follow you in. And you do not know what will happen to her now- what _has_ happened to her _already_ \- but she's lost from you.

The moment her eyes became pools of blood she was _lost_ from you.)

"I'm sorry, Cahya," she whimpers, "I'm _so **sorry**."_ (Because she knows, too, doesn't she?)


End file.
